Floyd Mayweather Jr. laughs during a timeout during the second half of a basketball game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. / Marc Lebryk, USA TODAY Sports

by Bob Velin, USA TODAY Sports

by Bob Velin, USA TODAY Sports

LAS VEGAS â?? Boxing's cold war flared up again Saturday afternoon when Golden Boy Promotions held a Marcos Maidana news conference at the MGM Grand, hours before the Top Rank show featuring the rematch between Manny Pacquiao and Timothy Bradley was set to begin in the hotel's Grand Garden Arena.

Maidana is scheduled to fight Floyd Mayweather at the same venue May 3.

Golden Boy and Top Rank have feuded for years, well before Golden Boy blew off a negotiating session in 2009 at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas for a possible Mayweather-Pacquiao mega-fight, which still hasn't happened. Boxing's two biggest promotional companies earlier fought over the rights to Pacquiao, with Top Rank winning out but Golden Boy getting a portion of each Pacquiao purse until the two sides settled in 2012.

Leonard Ellerbe, the CEO of Mayweather Promotions, said at the Maidana event that there's no comparison in the size of the two events. "We put on the biggest events, their fight is not even sold out," Ellerbe said of Pacquiao-Bradley. "You can go online and get tickets anywhere. The difference is that this morning we were over $14 million for the gate. People come to see Floyd Mayweather fight in big events. That's why we do the kind of numbers that we do.

"But I'm not here to say anything negative about their event. They're going to have a good event. Both fighters are very, very good and we wish them the best."

The Golden Boy news conference comes in the midst of a war of words between the MGM Grand and Top Rank's Bob Arum over the hotel/casino's prevalence of signs advertising the Mayweather-Maidana fight. The controversy boiled over on Wednesday, when Arum ripped the MGM Grand and Richard Sturm, its president of sports and entertainment, during the final news conference for Pacquiao-Bradley II.

Many of the Mayweather-Maidana signs have since been replaced by Pacquiao-Bradley signage.